Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this is a special time of the year-- Christmas. All of us are in a hurry to get home. Our children are waiting for us to get home. Our families can't wait to share the joy of the day. We want fun around the fire and the household. I would hate to be the grinch who stole Christmas in the Senate. I don't want to think that 10 years from now, if only I hadn't said this, this wouldn't have happened or, maybe, if I had seen it coming, I would have done something. In 2008 and 2009, the Senator from Montana, Senator Hoeven, and I, among others, went through the 2008-2009 housing crisis that ended up in mortgage-backed securities failures, in all of the trouble that happened on Wall Street--Dodd-Frank--and in the collapse of our economy. It was the worst collapse of our economy ever since 1927. We all remember what happened. We ended up getting the TARP. We ended up having crisis after crisis. Slowly but surely, we guaranteed enough stuff to get the market strong enough to begin to build back. Just now, it is back where it ought to be from the standpoint of values, which is a decade later. Quite frankly, the housing market is not as strong. Its only strength is that there are not that many houses for sale. That is because people aren't putting them on the market. Builders can't build specs, and there is not near the credit that there should be. People who have resales are putting them off and fixing the houses up because they are staying longer.…”